WoW – More fun together!

Off Topic: NaNoWriMo

On the off chance that someone on the geeky side of the internet hasn’t heard of it, November is National Novel Writing Month. Every year several (hundred) (thousand) people write or attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in November. I’ve been doing it for 9 years now. When I started, it was several thousand people; I think it’s close to a quarter million participants these days. At any rate it’s a disgusting number of words written.

It works out to 1,667 words per day, every day, all month. That’s about 2-3 times longer than the standard blog post but the words don’t have to be *good* words, just words. It can be original fiction, fan fiction, people even do non fiction. Poetry, weird literary stuff, whatever you like. Just write.

In my years of participating, some years the NaNo book is literally all I write – but I write it. I failed one year and I’m still kicking myself for that. This year Rev and I want to use NaNo to catapult ourselves back into writing. We’re collaborating hard on the novel he’s going to write and are up to our eyeballs in notes for a steampunk joyride. My novel is a little easier, not requiring much actual research, but I’m looking forward to plunging into a fairly epic fantasy tale, with princesses and knights and magic and backstabbing, arranged marriages, and berserker rages. I don’t believe in “write what you know”: I prefer “write what you want to read”.

Anyhow for anyone out there who enjoys writing, I can’t recommend NaNo enough. It gets you off your butt and starts you writing, instead of thinking about that story you’re going to tell someday. Any WoW player knows you don’t get better just by wishing; you go read elitist jerks and reforge your gear and spend time on the practice dummies and then you wipe. And then you get better. And then you down bosses.

ooo… maybe so… Something like ‘Autonomous Robot War Machine Operators Manual’. Every other chapter is from the manual and the alternate chapters are calls to the tech support hotline… hehe muwahahaha!!

I’m pretty sure NaNoWriMo would kill me. They’d find my broken corpse splayed over my keyboard on December 1st, a mere 15,000 words into the novel, one finger still vainly twitching over the space bar. I simply cannot write that much in that short a time.